Ally and Andrew Dodge say they know a good thing when they see it – that’s why they’ve just ordered their seventh motorhome from Deluxe RV Group. Penny Lewis went to find out more.
Seasoned campers Ally and Andrew Dodge have just put in an order for their seventh motorhome. The Dodges, who live in Murchison in the Tasman District, purchased their first RV in early 2012 – and it wasn’t for reasons you might expect. They had farmed for many years and run several businesses, including a Monday-to-Friday firewood operation, but on one chilly Christmas Day, they had a customer turn up to buy wood. It was the push they needed.
“We decided we would get a campervan and we would disappear. We both come from families that had camped anyway, so we decided we would just go about 30km out of town, down near the river, with no cell phone or reception,” Ally says. “We got to like it and it just snowballed from there.”
They bought their first RV, a Ford Transit, from Blenheim’s DeLuxe RV Group and they’ve been going back ever since. “We did tell them once we were looking at what a dealer had in Christchurch, just to keep them honest,” Andrew says with a laugh.
After the Transit, the Dodges bought a Volkswagen Crafter in 2013. The Transit and the Crafter were used vehicles, but their motorhomes since then have been new – a Winnebago in 2016, a Pilote in 2018 and two Le Voyageurs, purchased in 2019 and 2021. The Dodges’ seventh motorhome, due to arrive next year, is the 2024 Le Voyageur 8.7 Heritage Edition.
Andrew explains why he and Ally are such loyal DeLuxe RV customers. “They are two notches better than good. From day one they were most helpful, and they are a longstanding business. They are nearby – Blenheim is a couple of hours’ drive from Murchison. I know from experience that machinery and vehicles need servicing and maintenance, and I didn’t want to have to go to Hamilton or Auckland to get it done.”
And why have they updated so often? “Someone said to us one day, ‘hearses don’t tow trailers to the cemetery’. You can’t take it with you when you’re gone. We thought about that. You don’t know what’s around the corner. We also find that with updating our motorhomes, you continue to stay in a warranty situation. We are blessed because we can do it,” Ally says. “The Pilote and the Le Voyageurs are A class and have a lot to offer,” she adds. “We spend a lot of time away and you still want your comforts from home at our age”.
The now-retired couple, who are in their early 70s, met as teenagers at Rangiora High School. Ally was from Kaiapoi, and Andrew grew up on his parents’ dairy farm at nearby Clarkville. They got married in 1972 when Ally was 20 and Andrew had just turned 21 and now have two children, eight grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
When their children were young the family travelled frequently. “Because we’re dairy farmers, I didn’t want our kids to go back to primary school and get asked, ‘What did you do in the holidays?’ and have them say, ‘We can’t go on holidays because Mum and Dad are busy on the farm’. We made sure that we had staff on so we could make it happen,” Andrew says.
The family holidayed in Australia and the Pacific Islands several times. As the kids grew up, Ally and Andrew also enjoyed holidays together. “I think since 1988, we’ve been out of the country 28 times, and of those 28 times, 19 trips have been to Australia,” Andrew says.
But now, there’s nothing better for this couple than the two of them hitting the road in their motorhome. The couple’s travels have taken them all over the South Island, as well as a sizeable chunk of the North Island. A lot of the routes have been planned around Andrew’s passion for cycling. He currently has an electric mountain bike. “Andrew’s a big biker. He’s done 19,000km in the past five years,” Ally says.
Ally used to cycle a bit as well, but a mishap saw her come off her bike and injure her shoulder badly, so now when she’s pedalling it’s on her trike. “As a kid she started out with a bike with training wheels and she’s ended up with one with three wheels on it, too,” says Andrew with a laugh. The trike lives in the back of the motorhome when Ally drives and Andrew cycles to their next destination. “I’m called the Sherpa, and he’s allowed to sleep with the Sherpa,” Ally jokes.
Before Covid, the Dodges travelled in their motorhome for up to half of the year. Now they’re away up to 30 per cent of the time. They’ve learned a few tricks about motorhome life along the way – from their own experience and from experienced motorhome friends.
“You learn a lot from other people giving you advice,” says Ally. “Because we have only been motorhoming for 11 years, whereas there are others out there who have been doing it for 30 or 40 years.”
Tips include cooking meals in tin-foil trays to save on washing up, and carrying a supply of inexpensive plastic tumblers for kitchen waste to avoid clogging the plumbing in your campervan. They pour any cooled cooking fat and oil into a tumbler and pop it into the deep freeze, to be easily disposed of later.
“One of the cliches I like to use is ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broken’,” Andrew says. He recalls a time he was on his bike, heading into Karamea on the West Coast. Ally was driving and he heard one of their motorhome’s tyres making a noise. It was a Thursday afternoon, and they weren’t heading back to Greymouth until Tuesday.
“We stopped and looked at the tyre. It had a foreign object, a screw or something, in it. Now I know the best thing you can do if that tyre stays up with air in it, is leave it. I spent all weekend worrying if we should take the screw out of the tyre, but if we had tried to take it out, we would have been in Karamea all weekend with a flat tyre and no garage open,” Andrew says.
“The other thing I have learned is that in a campervan, there is only room for one person in the kitchen,” he adds. “We sorted that out early on. I cook, she cleans.” Ally says the couple enjoys a lot of stir-fry meals. One of their best buys was a wok. Its high sides save the cooktop from getting splattered and needing to be cleaned all the time. “I love the wok because it’s only one dish to clean,” she says.
As for other tips, Andrew recommends always emptying your waste cassette when you go past a dump station, in case you don’t encounter another station for a while.
The Dodges volunteer as custodians at their local NZMCA park in Murchison, along with other families. They enjoy the camaraderie of meeting visitors staying in the park. “We probably spend too much time talking to them,” Andrew says. “Ally gets on Facebook with some of them. It’s a very sociable club, the NZMCA.”
When Ally and Andrew head away on longer trips, they also take their Suzuki Jimny, which they tow on the back of their motorhome. “We use Jimny to do all our shopping, so rather than running the camper around to do all those jobs, you can just do all those things in the little Jimny,” Ally says.
“We like to have our days full, but if we get waylaid, we don’t push ourselves,” she says. “There’s always another tomorrow. Life’s never been better since we started doing this. There’s just less stress. You’ve got nothing really to worry about.”
